Chapter XVII

The Beginnings

What a singular shape of a Man; shape of a Time, have we in this

Abbot Samson and his history; how strangely do modes, creeds,

formularies, and the date and place of a man's birth, modify the

figure of the man!

Formulas too, as we call them, have a _reality_ in Human Life.

They are real as the very _skin_ and _muscular tissue_ of a Man's

Life; and a most blessed indispensable thing, so long as they

have _vitality_ withal, and are a living skin and tissue to him!

No man, or man's life, can go abroad and do business in the world

without skin and tissues. No; first of all, these have to

fashion themselves,--as indeed they spontaneously and inevitably

do. Foam itself, and this is worth thinking of, can harden into

oyster-shell; all living objects do by necessity form to

themselves a skin.

And yet, again, when a man's Formulas become _dead;_ as all

Formulas, in the progress of living growth, are very sure to do!

When the poor man's integuments, no longer nourished from within,

become dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity,

wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier; till no _heart_

any longer can be felt beating through them, so thick, callous,

calcified are they; and all over it has now grown mere calcified

oystershell, or were it polished mother-of-pearl, inwards almost

to the very heart of the poor man:--yes then, you may say, his

usefulness once more is quite obstructed; once more, he cannot

go abroad and do business in the world; it is time that

_he_ take to bed, and prepare for departure, which cannot now

be distant!

_Ubi homines sunt modi sunt._ Habit is the deepest law of human

nature. It is our supreme strength; if also, in certain

circumstances, our miserablest weakness.--From Stoke to Stowe is

as yet a field, all pathless, untrodden: from Stoke where I

live, to Stowe where I have to make my merchandises, perform my

businesses, consult my heavenly oracles, there is as yet no path

or human footprint; and I, impelled by such necessities, must

nevertheless undertake the journey. Let me go once, scanning my

way with any earnestness of outlook, and successfully arriving,

my footprints are an invitation to me a second time to go by the

same way. It is easier than any other way: the industry of

'scanning' lies already invested in it for me; I can go this

time with less of scanning, or without scanning at all. Nay the

very sight of my footprints, what a comfort for me; and in a

degree, for all my brethren of mankind! The footprints are

trodden and retrodden; the path wears ever broader, smoother,

into a broad highway, where even wheels can run; and many travel

it;--till--till the Town of Stowe disappear from that locality

(as towns have been known to do), or no merchandising, heavenly

oracle, or real business any longer exist for one there: then

why should anybody travel the way?--Habit is our primal,

fundamental law; Habit and Imitation, there is nothing more

perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all

Working and all Apprenticeship, of all Practice and all Learning,

in this world.

Yes, the wise man too speaks, and acts, in Formulas; all men do

so. In general the more completely cased with Formulas a man may

be, the safer, happier is it for him. Thou who, in an All of

rotten Formulas, seemest to stand nigh bare, having indignantly

shaken off the superannuated rags and unsound callosities of

Formulas,--consider how thou too art still clothed! This English

Nationality, whatsoever from uncounted ages is genuine and a fact

among thy native People, and their words and ways: all this, has

it not made for thee a skin or second-skin, adhesive actually as

thy natural skin? This thou hast not stript off, this thou wilt

never strip off: the humour that thy mother gave thee has to

shew itself through this. A common, or it may be an uncommon

Englishman thou art: but good Heavens, what sort of Arab,

Chinaman, Jew-Clothesman, Turk, Hindoo, African Mandingo, wouldst

_thou_ have been, thou with those mother-qualities of thine!

It strikes me dumb to look over the long series of faces, such as

any full Church, Courthouse, London-Tavern Meeting, or miscellany

of men will shew them. Some score or two of years ago, all these

were little red-coloured pulpy infants; each of them capable of

being kneaded, baked into any social form you chose: yet see now

how they are fixed and hardened,--into artisans, artists, clergy,

gentry, learned sergeants, unlearned dandies, and can and shall

now be nothing else henceforth!

Mark on that nose the colour left by too copious port and viands;

to which the profuse cravat with exorbitant breastpin, and the

fixed, forward, and as it were menacing glance of the eyes

correspond. That is a 'Man of Business;' prosperous

manufacturer, house-contractor, engineer, law-manager; his eye,

nose, cravat have, in such work and fortune, got such a

character: deny him not thy praise, thy pity. Pity him too, the

Hard-handed, with bony brow, rudely combed hair, eyes looking out

as in labour, in difficulty and uncertainty; rude mouth, the

lips coarse, loose, as in hard toil and lifelong fatigue they

have got the habit of hanging:--hast thou seen aught more

touching than the rude intelligence, so cramped, yet energetic,

unsubduable, true, which looks out of that marred visage? Alas,

and his poor wife, with her own hands, washed that cotton

neckcloth for him, buttoned that coarse shirt, sent him forth

creditably trimmed as she could. In such imprisonment lives he,

for his part; man cannot now deliver him: the red pulpy infant

has been baked and fashioned so.

Or what kind of baking was it that this other brother-mortal got,

which has baked him into the genus Dandy? Elegant Vacuum;

serenely looking down upon all Plenums and Entities, as low and

poor to his serene Chimeraship and _Non_entity laboriously

attained! Heroic Vacuum; inexpugnable, while purse and present

condition of society hold out; curable by no hellebore. The

doom of Fate was, Be thou a Dandy! Have thy eye-glasses, opera-

glasses, thy Long-Acre cabs with white-breeched tiger, thy

yawning impassivities, pococurantisms; fix thyself in Dandyhood,

undeliverable; it is thy doom.

And all these, we say, were red-coloured infants; of the same

pulp and stuff, few years ago; now irretrievably shaped and

kneaded as we see! Formulas? There is no mortal extant, out of

the depths of Bedlam, but lives all skinned, thatched, covered

over with Formulas; and is, as it were, held in from delirium

and the Inane by his Formulas! They are withal the most

beneficent, indispensable of human equipments: blessed he who

has a skin and tissues, so it be a living one, and the heart-

pulse everywhere discernible through it. Monachism, Feudalism,

with a real King Plantagenet, with real Abbots Samson, and their

other living realities, how blessed!--

Not without a mournful interest have we surveyed this authentic

image of a Time now wholly swallowed. Mournful reflections crowd

on us; and yet consolatory. How many brave men have lived

before Agamemnon! Here is a brave governor Samson, a man fearing

God, and fearing nothing else; of whom as First Lord of the

Treasury, as King, Chief Editor, High Priest, we could be so glad

and proud; of whom nevertheless Fame has altogether forgotten to

make mention! The faint image of him, revived in this hour, is

found in the gossip of one poor Monk, and in Nature nowhere else.

Oblivion had so nigh swallowed him altogether, even to the echo

of his ever having existed. What regiments and hosts and

generations of such has Oblivion already swallowed! Their

crumbled dust makes up the soil our life-fruit grows on. Said I

not, as my old Norse Fathers taught me, The Life-tree Igdrasil,

which waves round thee in this hour, whereof thou in this hour

art portion, has its roots down deep in the oldest Death-

Kingdoms; and grows; the Three Nornas, or _Times,_ Past,

Present, Future, watering it from the Sacred Well!

For example, who taught thee to _speak?_ From the day when two

hairy-naked or fig-leaved Human Figures began, as uncomfortable

dummies, anxious no longer to be dumb, but to impart themselves

to one another; and endeavoured, with gaspings, gesturings, with

unsyllabled cries, with painful pantomime and interjections, in a

very unsuccessful manner,--up to the writing of this present

copyright Book, which also is not very successful! Between that

day and this, I say, there has been a pretty space of time; a

pretty spell of work, which _somebody_ has done! Thinkest thou

there were no poets till Dan Chaucer? No heart burning with a

thought, which it could not hold, and had no word for; and

needed to shape and coin a word for,--what thou callest a

metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we have, there was

such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new

metaphor, and bold questionable originality. 'Thy very

ATTENTION, does it not mean an _attentio,_ a STRETCHING-TO?'

Fancy that act of the mind, which all were conscious of, which

none had yet named,--when this new 'poet' first felt bound and

driven to name it! His questionable originality, and new glowing

metaphor, was found adoptable, intelligible; and remains our

name for it to this day.

Literature:--and look at Paul's Cathedral, and the Masonries and

Worships and Quasi-Worships that are there; not to speak of

Westminster Hall and its wigs! Men had not a hammer to begin

with, not a syllabled articulation: they had it all to make;--

and they have made it. What thousand thousand articulate, semi-

articulate, earnest-stammering _Prayers_ ascending up to Heaven,

from hut and cell, in many lands, in many centuries, from the

fervent kindled souls of innumerable men, each struggling to pour

itself forth incompletely as it might, before the incompletest

_Liturgy_ could be compiled! The Liturgy, or adoptable and

generally adopted Set of Prayers and Prayer-Method, was what we

can call the Select Adoptabilities, 'Select Beauties' well-edited

(by Oecumenic Councils and other Useful-Knowledge Societies) from

that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers already extant and

accumulated, good and bad. The good were found adoptable by men;

were gradually got together, well-edited, accredited: the bad,

found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually forgotten,

disused and burnt. It is the way with human things. The first

man who, looking with opened soul on this August Heaven and

Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which we name Nature, Universe

and such like, the essence of which remains forever UNNAMEABLE;

he who first, gazing into this, fell on his knees awestruck, in

silence as is likeliest,--he, driven by inner necessity, the

'audacious original' that he was, had done a thing, too, which

all thoughtful hearts saw straightway to be an expressive,

altogether adoptable thing! To bow the knee was ever since the

attitude of supplication. Earlier than any spoken Prayers,

_Litanias,_ or Leitourgias;_ the beginning of all Worship,--

which needed but a beginning, so rational was it. What a poet

he! Yes, this bold original was a successful one withal. The

wellhead this one, hidden in the primeval dusks and distances,

from whom as from a Nile-source all _Forms of Worship_ flow:--

such a Nile-river (somewhat muddy and malarious now!) of Forms of

Worship sprang there, and flowed, and flows, down to Puseyism,

Rotatory Calabash, Archbishop Laud at St. Catherine Creed's, and

perhaps lower!

Things rise, I say, in that way. The _Iliad_ Poem, and indeed

most other poetic, especially epic things, have risen as the

Liturgy did. The great _Iliad_ in Greece, and the small _Robin

Hood's Garland_ in England, are each, as I understand, the well-

edited 'Select Beauties' of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of

Heroic Ballads in their respective centuries and countries.

Think what strumming of the seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing

of the less heroic fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and

English wayside Public Houses; and beating of the studious

Poetic brain, and gasping here too in the semi-articulate

windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath of a Divine Achilles,

the Prowess of a Will Scarlet or Wakefield Pinder, could be

adequately sung! Honour to you, ye nameless great and greatest

ones, ye long-forgotten brave!

Nor was the Statute _De Tallagio non concedendo,_ nor any

Statute, Law-method, Lawyer's-wig, much less were the Statute-

Book and Four Courts, with Coke upon Lyttleton and Three Estates

of Parliament in the rear of them, got together without human

labour,--mostly forgotten now! From the time of Cain's slaying

Abel by swift head-breakage, to this time of killing your man in

Chancery by inches, and slow heart-break for forty years,--there

too is an interval! Venerable justice herself began by Wild-

justice; all Law is as a tamed furrowfield, slowly worked out,

and rendered arable, from the waste jungle of Club-Law. Valiant

Wisdom tilling and draining; escorted by owl-eyed Pedantry, by

owlish and vulturish and many other forms of Folly;--the valiant

husbandman assiduously tilling; the blind greedy enemy _too_

assiduously sowing tares! It is because there is yet in

venerable wigged justice some wisdom, amid such mountains of

wiggeries and folly, that men have not cast her into the River;

that she still sits there, like Dryden's Head in the _Battle of

the Books,_--a huge helmet, a huge mountain of greased parchment,

of unclean horsehair, first striking the eye; and then in the

innermost corner, visible at last, in size as a hazelnut, a real

fraction of God's justice, perhaps not yet unattainable to some,

surely still indispensable to all;--and men know not what to do

with her! Lawyers were not all pedants, voluminous voracious

persons; Lawyers too were poets, were heroes,--or their Law had

been past the Nore long before this time. Their Owlisms,

Vulturisms, to an incredible extent, will disappear by and by,

their Heroisms only remaining, and the helmet be reduced to

something like the size of the head, we hope!--

It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed,

articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands

of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,--

honour to them; they, in _spite_ of the idle and the dastard.

This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found

of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the

generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable

because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage;

speakable in proportion to the number of these. This Land of

England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch

to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators,

and eternal proprietors are these following, and their

representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that

ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that

ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a

wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in

England. I tell thee, they had not a hammer to begin with; and

yet Wren built St. Paul's: not an articulated syllable; and yet

there have come English Literatures, Elizabethan Literatures,

Satanic-School, Cockney-School, and other Literatures;--once

more, as in the old time of the _Leitourgia,_ a most waste

imbroglio, and world-wide jungle and jumble; waiting terribly to

be 'well-edited,' and 'well-burnt!' Arachne started with

forefinger and thumb, and had not even a distaff; yet thou seest

Manchester, and Cotton Cloth, which will shelter naked backs, at

two-pence an ell.

Work? The quantity of done and forgotten work that lies silent

under my feet in this world, and escorts and attends me, and

supports and keeps me alive, wheresoever I walk or stand,

whatsoever I think or do, gives rise to reflections! Is it not

enough, at any rate, to strike the thing called 'Fame' into total

silence for a wise man? For fools and unreflective persons, she

is and will be very noisy, this 'Fame,' and talks of her

'immortals' and so forth: but if you will consider it, what is

she? Abbot Samson was not nothing because nobody _said_ anything

of him. Or thinkest thou, the Right Honourable Sir Jabesh

Windbag can be made something by Parliamentary Majorities and

Leading Articles? Her 'immortals!' Scarcely two hundred years

back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but

maunders and mumbles. She manages to recollect a Shakspeare or

so; and prates, considerably like a goose, about him;--and in

the rear of that, onwards to the birth of Theuth, to Hengst's

Invasion, and the bosom of Eternity, it was all blank; and the

respectable Teutonic Languages, Teutonic Practices, Existences

all came of their own accord, as the grass springs, as the trees

grow; no Poet, no work from the inspired heart of a Man needed

there; and Fame has not an articulate word to say about it! Or

ask her, What, with all conceivable appliances and mnemonics,

including apotheosis and human sacrifices among the number, she

carries in her head with regard to a Wodan, even a Moses, or

other such? She begins to be uncertain as to what they were,

whether spirits or men of mould,--gods, charlatans; begins

sometimes to have a misgiving that they were mere symbols, ideas

of the mind; perhaps nonentities, and Letters of the Alphabet!

She is the noisiest, inarticulately babbling, hissing, screaming,

foolishest, unmusicalest of fowls that fly; and needs no

'trumpet,' I think, but her own enormous goose-throat,--measuring

several degrees of celestial latitude, so to speak. Her 'wings,'

in these days, have grown far swifter than ever; but her goose-

throat hitherto seems only larger; louder and foolisher than

ever. _She_ is transitory, futile, a goose-goddess:--if she were

not transitory, what would become of us! It is a chief comfort

that she forgets us all; all, even to the very Wodans; and

grows to consider us, at last, as probably nonentities and

Letters of the Alphabet.

Yes, a noble Abbot Samson resigns himself to Oblivion too; feels

it no hardship, but a comfort; counts it as a still resting-

place, from much sick fret and fever and stupidity, which in the

night-watches often made his strong heart sigh. Your most sweet

voices, making one enormous goose-voice, O Bobus and Company, how

can they be a guidance for any Son of Adam? In _silence_ of you

and the like of you, the 'small still voices' will speak to him

better; in which does lie guidance.

My friend, all speech and rumour is shortlived, foolish, untrue.

Genuine WORK alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal,

as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself. Stand thou

by that; and let 'Fame' and the rest of it go prating.

"Heard are the Voices,

Heard are the Sages,

The Worlds and the Ages:

"Choose well, your choice is

Brief and yet endless.

Here eyes do regard you,

In Eternity's stillness;

Here is all fulness,

Ye brave, to reward you;

Work, and despair not."

--Goethe

Book III--The Modern Worker

Chapter I

Phenomena

But, it is said, our religion is gone: we no longer believe in

St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him 'on the rim of the

sky,' minatory or confirmatory! God's absolute Laws, sanctioned

by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral

Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and

Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the

Moral Sublime.

It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have

forgotten God;'--in the most modern dialect and very truth of the

matter, we have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it _is

not._ We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance

of things, and opened them only to the Shews and Shams of things.

We quietly believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great

unintelligible PERHAPS; extrinsically, clear enough, it is a

great, most extensive Cattlefold and Workhouse, with most

extensive Kitchen-ranges, Dining-tables,--whereat he is wise who

can find a place! All the Truth of this Universe is uncertain;

only the profit and loss of it, the pudding and praise of it, are

and remain very visible to the practical man.

There is no longer any God for us! God's Laws are become a

Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency: the

Heavens overarch us only as an Astronomical Time-keeper; a butt

for Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot

sentimentalities at:--in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has

lost the _soul_ out of him; and now, after the due period,--

begins to find the want of it! This is verily the plague-spot;

centre of the universal Social Gangrene, threatening all modern

things with frightful death. To him that will consider it, here

is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with its world-wide

upas-boughs and accursed poison-exudations, under which the world

lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the focal-centre

of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when

you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no

God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt.

Vainly: in killing Kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French

Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, is found no remedy. The

foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, reappears in

new force and desperateness next hour.

For actually this is _not_ the real fact of the world; the world

is not made so, but otherwise!--Truly, any Society setting out

from this No-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two. The

Unveracities, escorted, each Unveracity of them by its

corresponding Misery and Penalty; the Phantasms, and Fatuities,

and ten-years Corn-Law Debatings, that shall walk the Earth at

noonday,--must needs be numerous! The Universe _being_

intrinsically a Perhaps, being too probably an 'infinite Humbug,'

why should any minor Humbug astonish us? It is all according to

the order of Nature; and Phantasms riding with huge clatter

along the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish

nobody. Enchanted St. Ives' Workhouses and Joe-Manton

Aristocracies; giant Working Mammonism near strangled in the

partridge-nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettantism,--this, in all

its branches, in its thousand thousand modes and figures, is a

sight familiar to us.

The Popish Religion, we are told, flourishes extremely in these

years; and is the most vivacious-looking religion to be met with

at present. _"Elle a trois cents ans dans le ventre,"_ counts M.

Jouffroy; _"c'est pourquoi je la respecte!"_--The old Pope of

Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long while they cart him

through the streets to bless the people on _Corpus-Christi_ Day,

complains of rheumatism; whereupon his Cardinals consult;--

construct him, after some study, a stuffed cloaked figure, of

iron and wood, with wool or baked hair; and place it in a

kneeling posture. Stuffed figure, or rump of a figure; to this

stuffed rump he, sitting at his ease on a lower level, joins, by

the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living head and outspread

hands: the rump with its cloaks kneels, the Pope looks, and

holds his hands spread; and so the two in concert bless the

Roman population on _Corpus-Christi_ Day, as well as they can.

I have considered this amphibious Pope, with the wool-and-iron

back, with the flesh head and hands; and endeavoured to

calculate his horoscope. I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff

that has darkened God's daylight, or painted himself in the human

retina, for these several thousand years. Nay, since Chaos first

shivered, and 'sneezed,' as the Arabs say, with the first shaft

of sunlight shot through it, what stranger product was there of

Nature and Art working together? Here is a Supreme Priest who

believes God to be--What in the name of God _does_ he believe God

to be?--and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic

phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, Gregorian Chants,

mass-brayings, purple monsignori, wool-and-iron rumps,

artistically spread out,--to save the ignorant from worse.

O reader, I say not who are Belial's elect. This poor amphibious

Pope too gives loaves to the Poor; has in him more good latent

than he is himself aware of. His poor Jesuits, in the late

Italian Cholera, were, with a few German Doctors, the only

creatures whom dastard terror had not driven mad: they descended

fearless into all gulfs and bedlams; watched over the pillow of

the dying, with help, with counsel and hope; shone as luminous

fixed stars, when all else had gone out in chaotic night: honour

to them! This poor Pope,--who knows what good is in him? In a

Time otherwise too prone to forget, he keeps up the mournfulest

ghastly memorial of the Highest, Blessedest, which once was;

which, in new fit forms, will again partly have to be. Is he not

as a perpetual death's-head and cross-bones, with their

_Resurgam,_ on the grave of a Universal Heroism,--grave of a

Christianity? Such Noblenesses, purchased by the world's best

heart's-blood, must not be lost; we cannot afford to lose them,

in what confusions soever. To all of us the day will come, to a

few of us it has already come, when no mortal, with his heart

yearning for a 'Divine Humility,' or other 'Highest form of

Valour,' will need to look for it in death's-heads, but will see

it round him in here and there a beautiful living head.

Besides, there is in this poor Pope, and his practice of the

Scenic Theory of Worship, a frankness which I rather honour. Not

half and half, but with undivided heart does _he_ set about

worshiping by stage-machinery; as if there were now, and could

again be, in Nature no other. He will ask you, What other?

Under this my Gregorian Chant, and beautiful wax-light

Phantasmagory, kindly hidden from you is an Abyss, of black

Doubt, Scepticism, nay Sansculottic Jacobinism; an Orcus that

has no bottom. Think of that. 'Groby Pool _is_ thatched with

pancakes,'--as Jeannie Deans's Innkeeper defied it to be! The

Bottomless of Scepticism, Atheism, Jacobinism, behold, it is

thatched over, hidden from your despair, by stage-properties

judiciously arranged. This stuffed rump of mine saves not me

only from rheumatism, but you also from what other _isms!_ In

this your Life-pilgrimage Nowhither, a fine Squallacci marching-

music, and Gregorian Chant, accompanies you, and the hollow Night

of Orcus is well hid!

Yes truly, few men that worship by the rotatory Calabash of the

Calmucks do it in half so great, frank or effectual a way.

Drury-lane, it is said, and that is saying much, may learn from

him in the dressing of parts, in the arrangement of lights and

shadows. He is the greatest Play-actor that at present draws

salary in this world. Poor Pope; and I am told he is fast

growing bankrupt too; and will, in a measurable term of years (a

great way _within_ the 'three hundred'), not have a penny to make

his pot boil! His old rheumatic back will then get to rest; and

himself and his stage-properties sleep well in Chaos forevermore.

Or, alas, why go to Rome for Phantasms walking the streets?

Phantasms, ghosts, in this midnight hour, hold jubilee, and

screech and jabber; and the question rather were, What high

Reality anywhere is yet awake? Aristocracy has become Phantasm-

Aristocracy, no longer able to _do_ its work, not in the least

conscious that it has any work longer to do. Unable, totally

careless to _do_ its work; careful only to clamour for the

_wages_ of doing its work,--nay for higher, and _palpably_ undue

wages, and Corn-Laws and _increase_ of rents; the old rate of

wages not being adequate now! In hydra-wrestle, giant

_'Millo_cracy' so-called, a real giant, though as yet a blind one

and but half-awake, wrestles and wrings in choking nightmare,

'like to be strangled in the partridge-nets of Phantasm-

Aristocracy,' as we said, which fancies itself still to be a

giant. Wrestles, as under nightmare, till it do awaken; and

gasps and struggles thousandfold, we may say, in a truly painful

manner, through all fibres of our English Existence, in these

hours and years! Is our poor English Existence wholly becoming a

Nightmare; full of mere Phantasms?--

The Champion of England, cased in iron or tin, rides into

Westminster Hall, 'being lifted into his saddle with little

assistance,' and there asks, If in the four quarters of the

world, under the cope of Heaven, is any man or demon that dare

question the right of this King? Under the cope of Heaven no man

makes intelligible answer,--as several men ought already to have

done. Does not this Champion too know the world; that it is a

huge Imposture, and bottomless Inanity, thatched over with bright

cloth and other ingenious tissues? Him let us leave there,

questioning all men and demons.

Him we have left to his destiny; but whom else have we found?

From this the highest apex of things, downwards through all

strata and breadths, how many fully awakened Realities have we

fallen in with:--alas, on the contrary, what troops and

populations of Phantasms, not God-Veracities but Devil-Falsities,

down to the very lowest stratum,--which now, by such

superincumbent weight of Unveracities, lies enchanted in St.

Ives' Workhouses, broad enough, helpless enough! You will walk

in no public thoroughfare or remotest byway of English Existence

but you will meet a man, an interest of men, that has given up

hope in the Everlasting, True, and placed its hope in the

Temporary, half or wholly False. The Honourable Member complains

unmusically that there is 'devil's-dust' in Yorkshire cloth.

Yorkshire cloth,--why, the very Paper I now write on is made, it

seems, partly of plaster-lime well-smoothed, and obstructs my

writing! You are lucky if you can find now any good Paper,--any

work really _done;_ search where you will, from highest Phantasm

apex to lowest Enchanted basis!

Consider, for example, that great Hat seven-feet high, which now

perambulates London Streets; which my Friend Sauerteig regarded

justly as one of our English notabilities; "the topmost point as

yet," said he, "would it were your culminating and returning

point, to which English Puffery has been observed to reach!"--The

Hatter in the Strand of London, instead of making better felt-

hats than another, mounts a huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet

high, upon wheels; sends a man to drive it through the streets;

hoping to be saved _thereby._ He has not attempted to _make_

better hats, as he was appointed by the Universe to do, and as

with this ingenuity of his he could very probably have done; but

his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made

such! He too knows that the Quack has become God. Laugh not at

him, O reader; or do not laugh only. He has ceased to be comic;

he is fast becoming tragic. To me this all-deafening blast of

Puffery, of poor Falsehood grown necessitous, of poor Heart-

Atheism fallen now into Enchanted Workhouses, sounds too surely

like a Doom's-blast! I have to say to myself in old dialect:

"God's blessing is not written on all this, His curse is written

on all this!" Unless perhaps the Universe be a chimera;--some

old totally deranged eightday clock, dead as brass; which

the Maker, if there ever was any Maker, has long ceased to

meddle with?--To my Friend Sauerteig this poor seven-feet

Hat-manufacturer, as the topstone of English Puffery, was

very notable.

Alas, that we natives note him little, that we view him as a

thing of course, is the very burden of the misery. We take it

for granted, the most rigorous of us, that all men who have made

anything are expected and entitled to make the loudest possible

proclamation of it; call on a discerning public to reward them

for it. Every man his own trumpeter; that is, to a really

alarming extent, the accepted rule. Make loudest possible

proclamation of your Hat: true proclamation if that will do; if

that will not do, then false proclamation,--to such extent of

falsity as will serve your purpose; as will not seem too false

to be credible!--I answer, once for all, that the fact is not so.

Nature requires no man to make proclamation of his doings and

hat-makings; Nature forbids all men to make such. There is not

a man or hat-maker born into the world but feels, at first, that

he is degrading himself if he speak of his excellencies and

prowesses, and supremacy in his craft: his inmost heart says to

him, "Leave thy friends to speak of these; if possible, thy

enemies to speak of these; but at all events, thy friends!" He

feels that he is already a poor braggart; fast hastening to be a

falsity and speaker of the Untruth.

Nature's Laws, I must repeat, are eternal: her small still

voice, speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under

terrible penalties, be disregarded. No one man can depart from

the truth without damage to himself; no one million of men; no

Twenty-seven Millions of men. Shew me a Nation fallen everywhere

into this course, so that each expects it, permits it to others

and himself, I will shew you a Nation traveling with one assent

on the broad way. The broad way, however many Banks of England,

Cotton-Mills and Duke's Palaces it may have! Not at happy

Elysian fields, and everlasting crowns of victory, earned by

silent Valour, will this Nation arrive; but at precipices,

devouring gulfs, if it pause not. Nature has appointed happy

fields, victorious laurel-crowns; but only to the brave and

true: _Un_nature, what we call Chaos, holds nothing in it but

vacuities, devouring gulfs. What are Twenty-seven Millions, and

their unanimity? Believe them not: the Worlds and the Ages, God

and Nature and All Men say otherwise.

'Rhetoric all this?' No, my brother, very singular to say, it is

Fact all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. Forgotten in

these days, it is old as the foundations of the Universe, and

will endure till the Universe cease. It is forgotten now; and

the first mention of it puckers thy sweet countenance into a

sneer: but it will be brought to mind again,--unless indeed the

Law of Gravitation chance to cease, and men find that they can

walk on vacancy. Unanimity of the Twenty-seven Millions will do

nothing: walk not thou with them; fly from them as for thy

life. Twenty-seven Millions traveling on such courses, with gold

jingling in every pocket, with vivats heaven-high, are

incessantly advancing, let me again remind thee, towards the

_firm-land's end,_--towards the end and extinction of what

Faithfulness, Veracity, real Worth, was in their way of life.

Their noble ancestors have fashioned for them a 'life-road!'--in

how many thousand senses, this! There is not an old wise Proverb

on their tongue, an honest Principle articulated in their hearts

into utterance, a wise true method of doing and despatching any

work or commerce of men, but helps yet to carry them forward.

Life is still possible to them, because all is not yet Puffery,

Falsity, Mammon-worship and Unnature; because somewhat is yet

Faithfulness, Veracity and Valour. With a certain very

considerable finite quantity of Unveracity and Phantasm, social

life is still possible; not with an infinite quantity! Exceed

your certain quantity, the seven-feet Hat, and all things upwards

to the very Champion cased in tin, begin to reel and flounder,--

in Manchester Insurrections, Chartisms, Sliding-scales; the Law

of Gravitation not forgetting to act. You advance incessantly

towards the land's end; you are, literally enough, 'consuming

the way.' Step after step, Twenty-seven Million unconscious

men;--till you are at the land's end; till there is not

Faithfulness enough among you any more: and the next step now is

lifted _not_ over land, but into air, over ocean-deeps and

roaring abysses:--unless perhaps the Law of Gravitation have

forgotten to act?

O, it is frightful when a whole Nation, as our Fathers used to

say, has 'forgotten God;' has remembered only Mammon, and what

Mammon leads to! When your self-trumpeting Hatmaker is the

emblem of almost all makers, and workers, and men, that make

anything,--from soul-overseerships, body-overseerships, epic

poems, acts of parliament, to hats and shoe-blacking! Not one

false man but does uncountable mischief: how much, in a

generation or two, will Twenty-seven Millions, mostly false,

manage to accumulate? The sum of it, visible in every street,

marketplace, senate-house, circulating-library, cathedral,

cotton-mill, and union-workhouse, fills one _not_ with a

comic feeling!

Chapter II

Gospel of Mammonism

Reader, even Christian Reader as thy title goes, hast thou any

notion of Heaven and Hell? I rather apprehend, not. Often as

the words are on our tongue, they have got a fabulous or

semifabulous character for most of us, and pass on like a kind of

transient similitude, like a sound signifying little.

Yet it is well worth while for us to know, once and always, that

they are not a similitude, nor a fable nor semi-fable; that they

are an everlasting highest fact! "No Lake of Sicilian or other

sulphur burns now anywhere in these ages," sayest thou? Well,

and if there did not! Believe that there does not; believe it

if thou wilt, nay hold by it as a real increase, a rise to higher

stages, to wider horizons and empires. All this has vanished, or

has not vanished; believe as thou wilt as to all this. But that

an Infinite of Practical Importance, speaking with strict

arithmetical exactness, an _Infinite,_ has vanished or can vanish

from the Life of any Man: this thou shalt not believe! O

brother, the Infinite of Terror, of Hope, of Pity, did it not at

any moment disclose itself to thee, indubitable, unnameable?

Came it never, like the gleam of preternatural eternal Oceans,

like the voice of old Eternities, far-sounding through thy heart

of hearts? Never? Alas, it was not thy Liberalism then; it was

thy Animalism! The Infinite is more sure than any other fact.

But only men can discern it; mere building beavers, spinning

arachnes, much more the predatory vulturous and vulpine species,

do not discern it well!--

'The word Hell,' says Sauerteig, 'is still frequently in use

among the English People: but I could not without difficulty

ascertain what they meant by it. Hell generally signifies the

Infinite Terror, the thing a man is infinitely afraid of, and

shudders and shrinks from, struggling with his whole soul to

escape from it. There is a Hell therefore, if you will consider,

which accompanies man, in all stages of his history, and

religious or other development: but the Hells of men and Peoples

differ notably. With Christians it is the infinite terror of

being found guilty before the just Judge. With old Romans, I

conjecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for whom probably

they cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing unvirtuously,

which was their word for un_man_fully. And now what is it, if

you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he

calls his Worships and so forth,--what is it that the modern

English soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and

contemplate with entire despair? What is his Hell; after all

these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With

hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The terror

of "Not succeeding;" of not making money, fame, or some other

figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money! Is not that a

somewhat singular Hell?

Yes, O Sauerteig, it is very singular. If we do not 'succeed,'

where is the use of us? We had better never have been born.

"Tremble intensely," as our friend the Emperor of China says:

_there_ is the black Bottomless of Terror; what Sauerteig calls

the 'Hell of the English!'--But indeed this Hell belongs

naturally to the Gospel of Mammonism, which also has its

corresponding Heaven. For there is one Reality among so many

Phantasms; about one thing we are entirely in earnest: The

making of money. Working Mammonism does divide the world with

idle game-preserving Dilettantism:--thank Heaven that there is

even a Mammonism, anything we are in earnest about! Idleness is

worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at

anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things.

There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.

True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon-

Gospel, have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society;

and go about professing openly the totalest separation,

isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather,

cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair competition' and so

forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten

everywhere that _Cash-payment_ is not the sole relation of human

beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and

liquidates all engagements of man. "My starving workers?"

answers the rich Mill-owner: "Did not I hire them fairly in the

market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum

covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?"--Verily

Mammon-worship is a melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own

behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, "Where is thy

brother" he too made answer, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Did I

not pay my brother _his_ wages, the thing he had merited from me?

O sumptuous Merchant-Prince, illustrious game-preserving Duke, is

there no way of 'killing' thy brother but Cain's rude way! 'A

good man by the very look of him, by his very presence with us as

a fellow wayfarer in this Life-pilgrimage, _promises_ so much:'

woe to him if he forget all such promises, if he never know that

they were given! To a deadened soul, seared with the brute

Idolatry of Sense, to whom going to Hell is equivalent to not

making money, all 'promises,' and moral duties, that cannot be

pleaded for in Courts of Requests, address themselves in vain.

Money he can be ordered to pay, but nothing more. I have not

heard in all Past History, and expect not to hear in all Future

History, of any Society anywhere under God's Heaven supporting

itself on such Philosophy. The Universe is not made so; it is

made otherwise than so. The man or nation of men that thinks it

is made so, marches forward nothing doubting, step after step;

but marches--whither we know! In these last two centuries of

Atheistic Government (near two centuries now, since the blessed

restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and Defender of the Faith,

Charles Second), I reckon that we have pretty well exhausted what

of 'firm earth' there was for us to march on;--and are now, very

ominously, shuddering, reeling, and let us hope trying to recoil,

on the cliff's edge!--

For out of this that we call Atheism come so many other _isms_

and falsities, each falsity with its misery at its heels!--A SOUL

is not like wind (_spiritus,_ or breath) contained within a

capsule; the ALMIGHTY MAKER is not like a Clockmaker that once,

in old immemorial ages, having _made_ his Horologe of a Universe,

sits ever since and sees it go! Not at all. Hence comes

Atheism; come, as we say, many other _isms;_ and as the sum of

all, comes Valetism, the _reverse_ of Heroism; sad root of all

woes whatsoever. For indeed, as no man ever saw the above-said

wind-element enclosed within its capsule, and finds it at bottom

more deniable than conceivable; so too he finds, in spite of

Bridgewater Bequests, your Clockmaker Almighty an entirely

questionable affair, a deniable affair;--and accordingly denies

it, and along with it so much else. Alas, one knows not what and

how much else! For the faith in an Invisible, Unnameable,

Godlike, present everywhere in all that we see and work and

suffer, is the essence of all faith whatsoever; and that once

denied, or still worse, asserted with lips only, and out of bound

prayerbooks only, what other thing remains believable? That Cant

well-ordered is marketable Cant; that Heroism means gas-lighted

Histrionism; that seen with 'clear eyes' (as they call Valet-

eyes), no man is a Hero, or ever was a Hero, but all men are

Valets and Varlets. The accursed practical quintessence of all

sorts of Unbelief! For if there be now no Hero, and the Histrio

himself begin to be seen into, what hope is there for the seed of

Adam here below? We are the doomed everlasting prey of the

Quack; who, now in this guise, now in that, is to filch us, to

pluck and eat us, by such modes as are convenient for him. For

the modes and guises I care little. The Quack once inevitable,

let him come swiftly, let him pluck and eat me;--swiftly, that I

may at least have done with him; for in his Quack-world I can

have no wish to linger. Though he slay me, yet will I despise

him. Though he conquer nations, and have all the Flunkeys of the

Universe shouting at his heels, yet will I know well that _he_ is

an Inanity; that for him and his there is no continuance

appointed, save only in Gehenna and the Pool. Alas, the Atheist

world, from its utmost summits of Heaven and Westminster Hall,

downwards through poor sevenfeet Hats and 'Unveracities fallen

hungry,' down to the lowest cellars and neglected hunger-dens of

it, is very wretched.

One of Dr. Alison's Scotch facts struck us much.* A poor

Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of

Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all

resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of

that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she

was refused; referred from one to the other, helped by none;--

till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart

failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died, and infected

her Lane with fever, so that 'seventeen other persons' died of

fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks thereupon,

as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been

_economy_ to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and

killed seventeen of you!--Very curious. The forlorn Irish Widow

applies to her fellow-creatures, as if saying, "Behold I am

sinking, bare of help: ye must help me! I am your sister, bone

of your bone; one God made us: ye must help me!" They answer,

"No; impossible: thou art no sister of ours." But she proves

her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills _them:_ they actually

were her brothers, though denying it! Had man ever to go lower

for a proof?

------------

* _Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland:_ By

William Pulteney Alison, M.D. (Edinburgh, 1840)

------------

For, as indeed was very natural in such case, all government of

the Poor by the Rich has long ago been given over to Supply-and-

demand, Laissez-faire and such like, and universally declared to

be 'impossible.' "You are no sister of ours; what shadow of

proof is there? Here are our parchments, our padlocks, proving

indisputably our money-safes to be _ours,_ and you to have no

business with them. Depart! It is impossible!"--Nay, what

wouldst thou thyself have us do? cry indignant readers. Nothing,

my friends,--till you have got a soul for yourselves again. Till

then all things are 'impossible.' Till then I cannot even bid

you buy, as the old Spartans would have done, two-pence worth of

powder and lead, and compendiously shoot to death this poor Irish

Widow: even that is 'impossible' for you. Nothing is left but

that she prove her sisterhood by dying, and infecting you with

typhus. Seventeen of you lying dead will not deny such proof

that she was flesh of your flesh; and perhaps some of the living

may lay it to heart.

'Impossible:' of a certain two-legged animal with feathers, it

is said if you draw a distinct chalk-circle round him, he sits

imprisoned, as if girt with the iron ring of Fate; and will die

there, though within sight of victuals,--or sit in sick misery

there, and be fatted to death. The name of this poor two-legged

animal is--Goose; and they make of him, when well fattened,

_Pate de foie gras,_ much prized by some!

Chapter III

Gospel of Dilettantism

But after all, the Gospel of Dilettantism, producing a Governing

Class who do not govern, nor understand in the least that they

are bound or expected to govern, is still mournfuler than that of

Mammonism. Mammonism, as we said, at least works; this goes

idle. Mammonism has seized some portion of the message of Nature

to man; and seizing that, and following it, will seize and

appropriate more and more of Nature's message: but Dilettantism

has missed it wholly. 'Make money:' that will mean withal, 'Do

work in order to make money.' But, 'Go gracefully idle in

Mayfair,' what does or can that mean? An idle, game-preserving

and even corn-Jawing Aristocracy, in such an England as ours:

has the world, if we take thought of it, ever seen such a

phenomenon till very lately? Can it long continue to see such?

Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice, and

Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on that side of

our affairs, is altogether amazing. A Corn-Law demonstrating

itself openly, for ten years or more, with 'arguments' to make

the angels, and some other classes of creatures, weep! For men

are not ashamed to rise in Parliament and elsewhere, and speak

the things they do _not_ think. 'Expediency,' 'Necessities of

Party,' &c. &c.! It is not known that the Tongue of Man is a

sacred organ; that Man himself is definable in Philosophy as an

'Incarnate _Word;'_ the Word not there, you have no Man there

either, but a Phantasm instead! In this way it is that

Absurdities may live long enough,--still walking, and talking for

themselves, years and decades after the brains are quite out!

How are 'the knaves and dastards' ever to be got 'arrested' at

that rate?--

"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig

would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to

be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty,

ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into

some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;--perhaps

(this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its

head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity

is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on

one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love

honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest: most

kinds of dancing too; but the St.-Vitus kind not at all! A

fashionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's-

head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send _not_ him!"

Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime material of insincere

Action. Action hangs, as it were, _dissolved_ in Speech, in

Thought whereof Speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself

therefrom. The kind of Speech in a man betokens the kind of

Action you will get from him. Our Speech, in these modern days,

has become amazing. Johnson complained, "Nobody speaks in

earnest, Sir; there is no serious conversation." To us all

serious speech of men, as that of Seventeenth-Century Puritans,

Twelfth-Century Catholics, German Poets of this Century, has

become jargon, more or less insane. Cromwell was mad and a

quack; Anselm, Becket, Goethe, _ditto ditto._

Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more

significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by

the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same

Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to

do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities

and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,--

verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it

pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an

instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung

'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea

discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or

prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to

Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers,

affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that they found

him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these

men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That

probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore.

Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not

withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit

them, were all 'changed into Apes;'* sitting on the trees there,

grinning now in the most _un_affected manner; gibbering and

chattering _complete_ nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a

most indisputable Humbug! The Universe has _become_ a Humbug to

these Apes who thought it one! There they sit and chatter, to

this hour: only, I think, every Sabbath there returns to them a

bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit,

with their wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of

supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out, through those

blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest

universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of

Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it;

and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter

or mew:--truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of

man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost

them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with

unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls.

Didst thou never, O Traveler, fall in with parties of this tribe?

Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day.

---------

* Sale's _Koran_ (_Introduction_).

Chapter IV

Happy

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble:

be that here said and asserted once more. And in like manner too

all dignity is painful; a life of ease is not for any man, nor

for any god. The life of all gods figures itself to us as a

Sublime Sadness--earnestness of Infinite Battle against Infinite

Labour. Our highest religion is named the 'Worship of Sorrow.'

For the son of man there is no noble crown, well worn, or even

ill worn, but is a crown of thorns!--These things, in spoken

words, or still better, in felt instincts alive in every heart,

were once well known.

Does not the whole wretchedness, the whole _Atheism_ as I call

it, of man's ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in

that unspeakable Life-philosophy of his: The pretension to be

what he calls 'happy?' Every pitifulest whipster that walks

within a skin has his head filled with the notion that he is,

shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be, 'happy.'

His wishes, the pitifulest whipster's, are to be fulfilled for

him; his days, the pitifulest whipster's, are to flow on in

ever-gentle current of enjoyment, impossible even for the gods.

The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy; thou shalt love

pleasant things, and find them. The people clamour, Why have we

not found pleasant things?

We construct our theory of Human Duties, not on any Greatest-

Nobleness Principle, never so mistaken; no, but on a Greatest-

Happiness Principle. 'The word _Soul_ with us, as in some

Slavonic dialects, seems to be synonymous with _Stomach._ We

plead and speak, in our Parliaments and elsewhere, not as from

the Soul, but from the Stomach;--wherefore, indeed, our pleadings

are so slow to profit. We plead not for God's justice; we are

not ashamed to stand clamouring and pleading for our own

'interests,' our own rents and trade-profits; we say, They are

the 'interests' of so many; there is such an intense desire for

them in us! We demand Free-Trade, with much just vociferation

and benevolence, That the poorer classes, who are terribly ill-

off at present, may have cheaper New-Orleans bacon. Men ask on

Free-trade platforms, How can the indomitable spirit of

Englishmen be kept up without plenty of bacon? We shall become a

ruined Nation!--Surely, my friends, plenty of bacon is good and

indispensable: but, I doubt, you will never get even bacon by

aiming only at that. You are men, not animals of prey, well-used

or ill-used! Your Greatest-Happiness Principle seems to me fast

becoming a rather unhappy one.--What if we should cease babbling

about 'happiness,' and leave _it_ resting on its own basis, as it

used to do!

A gifted Byron rises in his wrath; and feeling too surely that

he for his part is not 'happy,' declares the same in very violent

language, as a piece of news that may be interesting. It

evidently has surprised him much. One dislikes to see a man and

poet reduced to proclaim on the streets such tidings: but on the

whole, as matters go, that is not the most dislikable. Byron

speaks the _truth_ in this matter. Byron's large audience

indicates how true it is felt to be.

'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it whether

thou art happy or not! Today becomes Yesterday so fast, all

Tomorrows become Yesterdays; and then there is no question

whatever of the 'happiness,' but quite another question. Nay,

thou hast such a sacred pity left at least for thyself, thy very

pains once gone over into Yesterday become joys to thee.

Besides, thou knowest not what heavenly blessedness and

indispensable sanative virtue was in them; thou shalt only know

it after many days, when thou art wiser!--A benevolent old

Surgeon sat once in our company, with a Patient fallen sick by

gourmandising, whom he had just, too briefly in the Patient's

judgment, been examining. The foolish Patient still at intervals

continued to break in on our discourse, which rather promised to

take a philosophic turn: "But I have lost my appetite," said he,

objurgatively, with a tone of irritated pathos; "I have no

appetite; I can't eat!"--"My dear fellow," answered the Doctor

in mildest tone, "it isn't of the slightest consequence;"--and

continued his philosophical discoursings with us!

Or does the reader not know the history of that Scottish iron

Misanthrope? The inmates of some town-mansion, in those Northern

parts, were thrown into the fearfulest alarm by indubitable

symptoms of a ghost inhabiting the next house, or perhaps even

the partition-wall! Ever at a certain hour, with preternatural

gnarring, growling and screeching, which attended as running

bass, there began, in a horrid, semi-articulate, unearthly voice,

this song: "Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm _mees_-erable!

Clack-clack-clack, gnarr-r-r, whuz-z: Once I was hap-hap-happy,

but now I'm _mees_-erable!"--Rest, rest, perturbed spirit;--or

indeed, as the good old Doctor said: My dear fellow, it isn't of

the slightest consequence! But no; the perturbed spirit could

not rest; and to the neighbours, fretted, affrighted, or at

least insufferably bored by him, it _was_ of such consequence

that they had to go and examine in his haunted chamber. In his

haunted chamber, they find that the perturbed spirit is an

unfortunate--Imitator of Byron? No, is an unfortunate rusty

Meat-jack, gnarring and creaking with rust and work; and this,

in Scottish dialect, is _its_ Byronian musical Life-philosophy,

sung according to ability!

Truly, I think the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for

his 'happiness,'--pothering, and were it ballot-boxing, poem-

making, or in what way soever fussing and exerting himself,--he

is not the man that will help us to 'get our knaves and dastards

arrested!' No; he rather is on the way to increase the number,

--by at least one unit and _his_ tail! Observe, too, that this is

all a modern affair; belongs not to the old heroic times, but to

these dastard new times. 'Happiness our being's end and aim' is

at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in

the world.

The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking

much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. Not "I

can't eat!" but "I can't work!" that was the burden of all wise

complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of

a man. That he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a

man fulfilled. Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life

is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man

can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,--

it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has

been: 'not of the slightest consequence' whether we were happy

as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as

job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and

sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard

labour and rust! But our work,--behold that is not abolished,

that has not vanished: our work, behold, it remains, or the want

of it remains;--for endless Times and Eternities, remains; and

that is now the sole question with us forevermore! Brief

brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns

tinsel-gilt, is gone; and divine everlasting Night, with her

star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come!

What hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness: all that

was but the _wages_ thou hadst; thou hast spent all that, in

sustaining thyself hitherward; not a coin of it remains with

thee, it is all spent, eaten: and now thy work, where is thy

work? Swift, out with it, let us see thy work!

Of a truth, if man were not a poor hungry dastard, and even

much of a blockhead withal, he would cease criticising his

victuals to such extent; and criticise himself rather, what

he does with his victuals!

Chapter V

The English

And yet, with all thy theoretic platitudes, what a depth of

practical sense in thee, great England! A depth of sense, of

justice, and courage; in which, under all emergencies and world-

bewilderments, and under this most complex of emergencies we now

live in, there is still hope, there is still assurance!

The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not

describe them. Like the old Romans, and some few others, _their_

Epic Poem is written on the Earth's surface: England her Mark!

It is complained that they have no artists: one Shakspeare

indeed; but for Raphael only a Reynolds; for Mozart nothing but

a Mr. Bishop: not a picture, not a song. And yet they did

produce one Shakspeare: consider how the element of Shakspearean

melody does lie imprisoned in their nature; reduced to unfold

itself in mere Cotton-mills, Constitutional Governments, and such

like;--all the more interesting when it does become visible, as

even in such unexpected shapes it succeeds in doing! Goethe

spoke of the Horse, how impressive, almost affecting it was that

an animal of such qualities should stand obstructed so; its

speech nothing but an inarticulate neighing, its handiness mere

_hoof_iness, the fingers all constricted, tied together, the

fingernails coagulated into a mere hoof, shod with iron. The

more significant, thinks he, are those eye-flashings of the

generous noble quadruped; those prancings, curvings of the neck

clothed with thunder.

A Dog of Knowledge has _free_ utterance; but the Warhorse is

almost mute, very far from free! It is even so. Truly, your

freest utterances are not by any means always the best: they are

the worst rather; the feeblest, trivialest; their meaning

prompt, but small, ephemeral. Commend me to the silent English,

to the silent Romans. Nay, the silent Russians too I believe to

be worth something: are they not even now drilling, under much

obloquy, an immense semi-barbarous half-world from Finland to

Kamtschatka, into rule, subordination, civilisation,--really in

an old Roman fashion; speaking no word about it; quietly hearing

all manner of vituperative Able Editors speak! While your ever-

talking, ever-gesticulating French, for example, what are they at

this moment drilling?--Nay, of all animals, the freest of

utterance, I should judge, is the genus Simia:_ go into the

Indian woods, say all Travelers, and look what a brisk, adroit,

unresting Ape-population it is!

The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of

the man; how much more the done Work. Whatsoever of morality

and of intelligence; what of patience, perseverance,

faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word,

whatsoever of Strength the man had in him will lie written in the

Work he does. To work: why, it is to try himself against

Nature, and her everlasting unerring Laws; these will tell a

true verdict as to the man. So much of virtue and of faculty did

_we_ find in him; so much and no more! He had such capacity of

harmonising himself with _me_ and my unalterable ever-veracious

Laws; of cooperating and working as _I_ bade him;--and has

prospered, and has not prospered, as you see!--Working as great

Nature bade him: does not that mean virtue of a kind; nay, of

all kinds? Cotton can be spun and sold, Lancashire operatives

can be got to spin it, and at length one has the woven webs and

sells them, by following Nature's regulations in that matter: by

not following Nature's regulations, you have them not. You have

them not;--there is no Cotton-web to sell: Nature finds a bill

against you; your 'Strength' is not Strength, but Futility! Let

faculty be honoured, so far as it is faculty. A man that can

succeed in working is to me always a man.

How one loves to see the burly figure of him, this thick-skinned,

seemingly opaque, perhaps sulky, almost stupid Man of Practice,

pitted against some light--adroit Man of Theory, all equipt with

clear logic, and able anywhere to give you Why for Wherefore! The

adroit Man of Theory, so light of movement, clear of utterance,

with his bow full-bent and quiver full of arrow-arguments,--

surely he will strike down the game, transfix everywhere the

heart of the matter; triumph everywhere, as he proves that he

shall and must do? To your astonishment, it turns out oftenest

No. The cloudy-browed, thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no

logic-utterance, in silence mainly, with here and there a low

grunt or growl, has in him what transcends all logic-utterance:

a Congruity with the Unuttered! The Speakable, which lies atop,

as a superficial film, or outer skin, is his or is not his: but

the Doable, which reaches down to the World's centre, you find

him there!

The rugged Brindleys has little to say for himself; the rugged

Brindley, when difficulties accumulate on him, retires silent,

'generally to his bed;' retires 'sometimes for three days

together to his bed, that he may be in perfect privacy there,'

and ascertain in his rough head how the difficulties can be

overcome. The ineloquent Brindley, behold he _has_ chained seas

together; his ships do visibly float over valleys, invisibly

through the hearts of mountains; the Mersey and the Thames, the

Humber and the Severn have shaken hands: Nature most audibly

answers, Yea! The man of Theory twangs his full-bent bow:

Nature's Fact ought to fall stricken, but does not: his logic-

arrow glances from it as from a scaly dragon, and the obstinate

Fact keeps walking its way. How singular! At bottom, you will

have to grapple closer with the dragon; take it home to you, by

real faculty, not by seeming faculty; try whether you are

stronger or it is stronger. Close with it, wrestle it: sheer

obstinate toughness of muscle; but much more, what we call

toughness of heart, which will mean persistance hopeful and even

desperate, unsubduable patience, composed candid openness,

clearness of mind: all this shall be 'strength' in wrestling

your dragon; the whole man's real strength is in this work, we

shall get the measure of him here.

Of all the Nations in the world at present we English are the

stupidest in speech, the wisest in action. As good as a 'dumb'

Nation, I say, who cannot speak, and have never yet spoken,--

spite of the Shakspeares and Miltons who skew us what

possibilities there are!--O Mr. Bull, I look in that surly face

of thine with a mixture of pity and laughter, yet also with

wonder and veneration. Thou complainest not, my illustrious

friend; and yet I believe the heart of thee is full of sorrow,

of unspoken sadness, seriousness,--profound melancholy (as some

have said) the basis of thy being. Unconsciously, for thou

speakest of nothing, this great Universe is great to thee. Not

by levity of floating, but by stubborn force of swimming, shalt

thou make thy way. The Fates sing of thee that thou shalt many

times be thought an ass and a dull ox, and shalt with a god-like

indifference believe it. My friend,--and it is all untrue,

nothing ever falser in point of fact! Thou art of those great

ones whose greatness the small passer-by does not discern. Thy

very stupidity is wiser than their wisdom. A grand _vis

inertiae_ is in thee; how many grand qualities unknown to small

men! Nature alone knows thee, acknowledges the bulk and strength

of thee: thy Epic, unsung in words, is written in huge

characters on the face of this Planet,--sea-moles, cotton-trades,

railways, fleets and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New-

Hollands; legible throughout the Solar System!

But the dumb Russians too, as I said, they, drilling all wild

Asia and wild Europe into military rank and file, a terrible yet

hitherto a prospering enterprise, are still dumber. The old

Romans also could not _speak,_ for many centuries:--not till the

world was theirs; and so many speaking Greekdoms, their logic-

arrows all spent, had been absorbed and abolished. The logic-

arrows, how they glanced futile from obdurate thick-skinned

Facts; Facts to be wrestled down only by the real vigour of

Roman thews!--As for me, I honour, in these loud-babbling days,

all the Silent rather. A grand Silence that of Romans;--nay the

grandest of all, is it not that of the gods! Even Triviality,

Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in

comparison! The 'talent of silence' is our fundamental one.

Great honour to him whose Epic is a melodious hexameter Iliad;

not a jingling Sham-Iliad, nothing true in it but the hexameters

and forms merely. But still greater honour, if his Epic be a

mighty Empire slowly built together, a mighty Series of Heroic

Deeds,--a mighty Conquest over Chaos; _which_ Epic the 'Eternal

Melodies' have, and must have, informed and dwelt in, as it sung

itself! There is no mistaking that latter Epic. Deeds are

greater than Words. Deeds have such a life, mute but undeniable,

and grow as living trees and fruit-trees do; they people the

vacuity of Time, and make it green and worthy. Why should the

oak prove logically that it ought to grow, and will grow? Plant

it, try it; what gifts of diligent judicious assimilation and

secretion it has, of progress and resistance, of _force_ to grow,

will then declare themselves. My much-honoured, illustrious,

extremely inarticulate Mr. Bull!--

Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter,--oftentimes the force

of dulness can no farther go. You stand silent, incredulous, as

over a platitude that borders on the Infinite. The man's

Churchisms, Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College

Philosophies, Fashionable Literatures, are unexampled in this

world. Fate's prophecy is fulfilled; you call the man an ox and

an ass. But set him once to work,--respectable man! His spoken

sense is next to nothing, nine-tenths of it palpable _nonsense:_

but his unspoken sense, his inner silent feeling of what is true,

what does agree with fact, what is doable and what is not

doable,--this seeks its fellow in the world. A terrible worker;

irresistible against marshes, mountains, impediments, disorder,

in civilisation; everywhere vanquishing disorder, leaving it

behind him as method and order. He 'retires to his bed three

days,' and considers!

Nay withal, stupid as he is, our dear John,--ever, after infinite

tumblings, and spoken platitudes innumerable from barrelheads and

parliament-benches, he does settle down somewhere about the just

conclusion; you are certain that his jumblings and tumblings

will end, after years or centuries, in the stable equilibrium.

Stable equilibrium, I say; centre-of-gravity lowest;--not the

unstable, with centre-of-gravity highest, as I have known it done

by quicker people! For indeed, do but jumble and tumble

sufficiently, you avoid that worst fault, of settling with your

centre-of-gravity highest; your centre-of-gravity is certain to

come lowest, and to stay there. If slowness, what we in our

impatience call 'stupidity,' be the price of stable equilibrium

over unstable, shall we grudge a little slowness? Not the least

admirable quality of Bull is, after all, that of remaining

insensible to logic; holding out for considerable periods, ten

years or more, as in this of the Corn-Laws, after all arguments

and shadow of arguments have faded away from him, till the very

urchins on the street titter at the arguments he brings. Logic,

--[Greek] the 'Art of Speech,'--does indeed speak so and so;

clear enough: nevertheless Bull still shakes his head; will see

whether nothing else _illogical,_ not yet 'spoken,' not yet able

to be 'spoken,' do not lie in the business, as there so often

does!--My firm belief is, that, finding himself now enchanted,

hand-shackled, foot-shackled, in Poor-Law Bastilles and

elsewhere, he will retire three days to his bed, and _arrive_ at

a conclusion or two! His three-years total stagnation of trade,

alas, is not that a painful enough 'lying in bed to consider

himself?' Poor Bull!

Bull is a born Conservative; for this too I inexpressibly honour

him. All great Peoples are conservative; slow to believe in

novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and

forever certain of the greatness that is in LAW, in Custom once

solemnly established, and now long recognised as just and final.

--True, O Radical Reformer, there is no Custom that can, properly

speaking, be final; none. And yet thou seest _Customs_ which,

in all civilised countries, are accounted final; nay, under the

Old Roman name of _Mores,_ are accounted _Morality,_ Virtue, Laws

of God Himself. Such, I assure thee, not a few of them are;

such almost all of them once were. And greatly do I respect the

solid character,--a blockhead, thou wilt say; yes, but a well-

conditioned blockhead, and the best-conditioned,--who esteems all

'Customs once solemnly acknowledged' to be ultimate, divine, and

the rule for a man to walk by, nothing doubting, not inquiring

farther. What a time of it had we, were all men's life and trade

still, in all parts of it, a problem, a hypothetic seeking, to be

settled by painful Logics and Baconian Inductions! The Clerk in

Eastcheap cannot spend the day in verifying his Ready-Reckoner;

he must take it as verified, true and indisputable; or his Book-

keeping by Double Entry will stand still. "Where is your Posted

Ledger?" asks the Master at night.--"Sir," answers the other, "I

was verifying my Ready-Reckoner, and find some errors. The

Ledger is--!"--Fancy such a thing!

True, all turns on your Ready-Reckoner being moderately correct,

--being _not_ insupportably incorrect! A Ready-Reckoner which has

led to distinct entries in your Ledger such as these:

_'Creditor_ an English People by fifteen hundred years of good

Labour; and _Debtor_ to lodging in enchanted Poor-Law Bastilles:

_Creditor_ by conquering the largest Empire the Sun ever saw;

and _Debtor_ to Donothingism and "Impossible" written on all

departments of the government thereof: _Creditor_ by mountains

of gold ingots earned; and _Debtor_ to No Bread purchasable by

them:'--_such_ Ready-Reckoner, methinks, is beginning to be

suspect; nay is ceasing, and has ceased, to be suspect! Such

Ready-Reckoner is a Solecism in Eastcheap; and must, whatever be

the press of business, and will and shall be rectified a little.

Business can go on no longer with _it._ The most Conservative

English People, thickest-skinned, most patient of Peoples, is

driven alike by its Logic and its Unlogic, by things 'spoken,'

and by things not yet spoken or very speakable, but only felt and

very unendurable, to be wholly a Reforming People. Their Life as

it is has ceased to be longer possible for them.

Urge not this noble silent People; rouse not the Berserkir-rage

that lies in them! Do you know their Cromwells, Hampdens, their

Pyms and Bradshaws? Men very peaceable, but men that can be made

very terrible! Men who, like their old Teutsch Fathers in

Agrippa's days, 'have a soul that despises death;' to whom

'death,' compared with falsehoods and injustices, is light;--'in

whom there is a range unconquerable by the immortal gods!'

Before this, the English People have taken very preternatural-

looking Spectres by the beard; saying virtually: "And if thou

_wert_ 'preternatural?' Thou with thy 'divine-rights' grown

diabolic wrongs? Thou,--not even 'natural;' decapitable;

totally extinguishable!"--Yes, just so godlike as this People's

patience was, even so godlike will and must its impatience be.

Away, ye scandalous Practical Solecisms, children actually of the

Prince of Darkness; ye have near broken our hearts; we can and

will endure you no longer. Begone, we say; depart, while the

play is good! By the Most High God, whose sons and born

missionaries true men are, ye shall not continue here! You and

we have become incompatible; can inhabit one house no longer.

Either you must go, or we. Are ye ambitious to try _which_ it

shall be?

O my Conservative friends, who still specially name and struggle

to approve yourselves 'Conservative,' would to Heaven I could

persuade you of this world-old fact, than which Fate is not

surer, That Truth and justice alone are _capable_ of being

'conserved' and preserved! The thing which is unjust, which is

not according to God's Law, will you, in a God's Universe, try to

conserve that? It is so old, say you? Yes, and the hotter haste

ought _you,_ of all others, to be in to let it grow no older! If

but the faintest whisper in your hearts intimate to you that it

is not fair,--hasten, for the sake of Conservatism itself, to

probe it rigorously, to cast it forth at once and forever if

guilty. How will or can you preserve _it,_ the thing that is not

fair? 'Impossibility' a thousandfold is marked on that. And ye

call yourselves Conservatives, Aristocracies:--ought not honour

and nobleness of mind, if they had departed from all the Earth

elsewhere, to find their last refuge with you? Ye unfortunate!

The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of the

tree itself. Old? Yes, it is too old. Many a weary winter has

it swung and creaked there, and gnawed and fretted, with its dead

wood, the organic substance and still living fibre of this good

tree; many a long summer has its ugly naked brown defaced the

fair green umbrage; every day it has done mischief, and that

only: off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more;

let the Conservatism that would preserve cut _it_ away. Did no

wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root

left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous; is as a dead iron

spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living

substance;--nay is far worse; for in every windstorm

('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts

itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as your dead iron

spike would!

If I were the Conservative Party of England (which is another

bold figure of speech), I would not for a hundred thousand pounds

an hour allow those Corn-Laws to continue! Potosi and Golconda

put together would not purchase my assent to them. Do you count

what treasuries of bitter indignation they are laying up for you

in every just English heart? Do you know what questions, not as

to Corn-prices and Sliding-scales alone, they are _forcing_ every

reflective Englishman to ask himself? Questions insoluble, or

hitherto unsolved; deeper than any of our Logic-plummets

hitherto will sound: questions deep enough,--which it were

better that we did not name even in thought! You are forcing us

to think of them, to begin uttering them. The utterance of them

is begun; and where will it be ended, think you? When two

millions of one's brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five

millions, as is insolently said, 'rejoice in potatoes,' there are

various things that must be begun, let them end where they can.

Chapter VI

Two Centuries

The Settlement effected by our 'Healing Parliament' in the Year

of Grace 1660, though accomplished under universal acclamations

from the four corners of the British Dominions, turns out to have

been one of the mournfulest that ever took place in this land of

ours. It called and thought itself a Settlement of brightest

hope and fulfilment, bright as the blaze of universal tar-barrels

and bonfires could make it: and we find it now, on looking back

on it with the insight which trial has yielded, a Settlement as

of despair. Considered well, it was a settlement to govern

henceforth without God, with only some decent Pretence of God.

Governing by the Christian Law of God had been found a thing of

battle, convulsion, confusion, an infinitely difficult thing:

wherefore let us now abandon it, and govern only by so much of

God's Christian Law as--as may prove quiet and convenient for us.

What is the end of Government? To guide men in the way wherein

they should go; towards their true good in this life, the portal

of infinite good in a life to come? To guide men in such way,

and ourselves in such way, as the Maker of men, whose eye is upon

us, will sanction at the Great Day?--Or alas, perhaps at bottom

_is_ there no Great Day, no sure outlook of any life to come;

but only this poor life, and what of taxes, felicities, Nell-

Gwyns and entertainments, we can manage to muster here? In that

case, the end of Government will be, To suppress all noise and

disturbance, whether of Puritan preaching, Cameronian psalm-

singing, thieves'-riot, murder, arson, or what noise soever, and

--be careful that supplies do not fail! A very notable

conclusion, if we will think of it; and not without an abundance

of fruits for us. Oliver Cromwell's body hung on the Tyburn-

gallows, as the type of Puritanism found futile, inexecutable,

execrable,--yes, that gallows-tree has been a fingerpost into

very strange country indeed. Let earnest Puritanism die; let

decent Formalism, whatsoever cant it be or grow to, live! We

have had a pleasant journey in that direction; and are--arriving

at our inn?

To support the Four Pleas of the Crowns and keep Taxes coming in:

in very sad seriousness, has not this been, ever since, even in

the best times, almost the one admitted end and aim of

Government? Religion, Christian Church, Moral Duty; the fact

that man had a soul at all; that in man's life there was any

eternal truth or justice at all,--has been as good as left

quietly out of sight. Church indeed,--alas, the endless talk and

struggle we have had of High-Church, Low-Church, Church-

Extension, Church-in-Danger: we invite the Christian reader to

think whether it has not been a too miserable screech-owl

phantasm of talk and struggle, as for a 'Church,'--which one had

rather not define at present!

But now in these godless two centuries, looking at England and

her efforts and doings, if we ask, What of England's doings the

Law of Nature had accepted, Nature's King had actually furthered

and pronounced to have truth in them,--where is our answer?

Neither the 'Church' of Hurd and Warburton, nor the Anti-church

of Hume and Paine; not in any shape the Spiritualism of England:

all this is already seen, or beginning to be seen, for what it

is; a thing that Nature does _not_ own. On the one side is

dreary Cant, with a _reminiscence_ of things noble and divine;

on the other is but acrid Candour, with a _prophecy_ of things

brutal, infernal. Hurd and Warburton are sunk into the sere and

yellow leaf; no considerable body of true-seeing men looks

thitherward for healing: the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory, of

'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality and the like, is

also in these days declaring itself naught, unable to keep the

world from taking fire.

The theories and speculations of both these parties, and, we may

say, of all intermediate parties and persons, prove to be things

which the Eternal Veracity did not accept; things superficial,

ephemeral, which already a near Posterity, finding them already

dead and brown-leafed, is about to suppress and forget. The

Spiritualism of England, for those godless years, is, as it were,

all forgettable. Much has been written: but the perennial

Scriptures of Mankind have had small accession: from all English

Books, in rhyme or prose, in leather binding or in paper

wrappage, how many verses have been added to these? Our most

melodious Singers have sung as from the throat outwards: from

the inner Heart of Man, from the great Heart of Nature, through

no Pope or Philips, has there come any tone. The Oracles have

been dumb. In brief, the Spoken Word of England has not been

true. The Spoken Word of England turns out to have been trivial;

of short endurance; not valuable, not available as a Word,

except for the passing day. It has been accordant with

transitory Semblance; discordant with eternal Fact. It has been

unfortunately not a Word, but a Cant; a helpless involuntary

Cant, nay too often a cunning voluntary one: either way, a very

mournful Cant; the Voice not of Nature and Fact, but of

something other than these.

With all its miserable shortcomings, with its wars,

controversies, with its trades-unions, famine-insurrections,--it

is her Practical Material Work alone that England has to shew for

herself! This, and hitherto almost nothing more; yet actually

this. The grim inarticulate veracity of the English People,

unable to speak its meaning in words, has turned itself silently

on things; and the dark powers of Material Nature have answered:

Yes, this at least is true, this is not false! So answers

Nature. Waste desert-shrubs of the Tropical swamps have become

Cotton-trees; and here, under my furtherance, are verily woven

shirts,--hanging unsold, undistributed, but capable to be

distributed, capable to cover the bare backs of my children of

men. Mountains, old as the Creation, I have permitted to be

bored through: bituminous fuel-stores, the wreck of forests that

were green a million years ago,--I have opened them from my

secret rock-chambers, and they are yours, ye English. Your huge

fleets, steamships, do sail the sea: huge Indias do obey you;

from huge _New_ Englands and Antipodal Australias, comes profit

and traffic to this Old England of mine! So answers Nature. The

Practical Labour of England is _not_ a chimerical Triviality: it

is a Fact, acknowledged by all the Worlds; which no man and no

demon will contradict. It is, very audibly, though very

inarticulately as yet, the one God's Voice we have heard in these

two atheistic centuries.

And now to observe with what bewildering obscurations and

impediments all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet

intelligible to no man! How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it

not to be the Voice of God to us, but regard it merely as a Voice

of earthly Profit-and-Loss. And have a Hell in England,--the

Hell of not making money. And coldly see the all-conquering

valiant Sons of Toil sit enchanted, by the million, in their

Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law;--mumbling to

ourselves some vague janglement of Laissez-faire, Supply-and-

demand, Cash-payment the one nexus of man to man: Free-trade,

Competition, and Devil take the hindmost, our latest Gospel

yet preached!

As if, in truth, there were no God of Labour; as if godlike

Labour and brutal Mammonism were convertible terms. A serious,

most earnest Mammonism grown Midas-eared; an unserious

Dilettantism, earnest about nothing, grinning with inarticulate

incredulous incredible jargon about all things, as the

_enchanted_ Dilettanti do by the Dead Sea! It is mournful

enough, for the present hour; were there not an endless hope in

it withal. Giant LABOUR, truest emblem there is of God the

World-Worker, Demiurgus, and Eternal Maker; noble LABOUR, which

is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the highest

throne,--staggering hitherto like a blind irrational giant,

hardly allowed to have his common place on the street-pavements;

idle Dilettantism, Dead-Sea Apism, crying out, "Down with him, he

is dangerous!"

Labour must become a seeing rational giant, with a soul in the

body of him, and take his place on the throne of things,--leaving

his Mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of

said throne.

Chapter VII

Over-Production

But what will reflective readers say of a Governing Class, such

as ours, addressing its Workers with an indictment of

'Overproduction!' Over-production: runs it not so? "Ye

miscellaneous, ignoble manufacturing individuals, ye have

produced too much! We accuse you of making above two-hundred

thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind. Your trousers

too, which you have made, of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch-

plaid, of jane, nankeen and woollen broadcloth, are they not

manifold? Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human

foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with--Nay, what say we

hats or shoes? You produce gold-watches, jewelleries, silver-

forks and epergnes, commodes, chiffoniers, stuffed sofas--

Heavens, the Commercial Bazaar and multitudinous Howel-and-

Jameses cannot contain you. You have produced, produced;--he

that seeks your indictment, let him look around. Millions of

shirts, and empty pairs of breeches, hang there in judgment

against you. We accuse you of over-producing: you are

criminally guilty of producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes and

commodities, in a frightful overabundance. And now there is a

glut, and your operatives cannot be fed!"

Never surely, against an earnest Working Mammonism was there

brought, by Game-preserving aristocratic Dilettantism, a stranger

accusation, since this world began. My lords and gentlemen,--

why, it was _you_ that were appointed, by the fact and by the

theory of your position on the Earth, to 'make and administer

Laws,'--that is to say, in a world such as ours, to guard against

'gluts;' against honest operatives, who had done their work,

remaining unfed! I say, _you_ were appointed to preside over the

Distribution and Apportionment of the Wages of Work done; and to

see well that there went no labourer without his hire, were it of

money-coins, were it of hemp gallows-ropes: that function was

yours, and from immemorial time has been; yours, and as yet no

other's. These poor shirt-spinners have forgotten much, which by

the virtual unwritten law of their position they should have

remembered: but by any written recognised law of their position,

what have they forgotten? They were set to make shirts. The

Community with all its voices commanded them, saying, "Make

shirts;"--and there the shirts are! Too many shirts? Well, that

is a novelty, in this intemperate Earth, with its nine-hundred

millions of bare backs! But the Community commanded you, saying,

"See that the shirts are well apportioned, that our Human Laws be

emblem of God's Laws;"--and where is the apportionment? Two

million shirtless or ill-shirted workers sit enchanted in

Workhouse Bastilles, five million more (according to some) in

Ugolino Hunger-cellars; and for remedy, you say, what say you?--

"Raise _our_ rents!" I have not in my time heard any stranger

speech, not even on the Shores of the Dead Sea. You continue

addressing those poor shirt-spinners and over-producers, in

really a _too_ triumphant manner:

"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of

overproduction? We take the Heavens and the Earth to witness

that we have produced nothing at all. Not from us proceeds this

frightful _over_plus of shirts. In the wide domains of created

Nature, circulates no shirt or thing of our producing. Certain

fox-brushes nailed upon our stable-door, the fruit of fair

audacity at Melton Mowbray; these we have produced, and they are

openly nailed up there. He that accuses us of producing, let him

shew himself, let him name what and when. We are innocent of

producing;--ye ungrateful, what mountains of things have we not,

on the contrary, had to 'consume,' and make away with! Mountains

of those your heaped manufactures, wheresoever edible or

wearable, have they not disappeared before us, as if we had the

talent of ostriches, of cormorants, and a kind of divine faculty

to eat? Ye ungrateful!--and did you not grow under the shadow of

our wings? Are not your filthy mills built on these fields of

ours; on this soil of England, which belongs to--whom think you?

And we shall not offer you our own wheat at the price that

pleases us, but that partly pleases you? A precious notion!

What would become of you, if we chose, at any time, to decide on

growing no wheat more?"

Yes, truly, here is the ultimate rock-basis of all Corn-Laws;

whereon, at the bottom of much arguing, they rest, as securely as

they can: What would become of you, if we decided, some day, on

growing no more wheat at all? If we chose to grow only partridges

henceforth, and a modicum of wheat for our own uses? Cannot we

do what we like with our own?--Yes, indeed! For my share, if I

could melt Gneiss Rock, and create Law of Gravitation; if I

could stride out to the Doggerbank, some morning, and striking

down my trident there into the mudwaves, say, "Be land, be

fields, meadows, mountains and fresh-rolling streams!" by Heaven,

I should incline to have the letting of _that_ land in

perpetuity, and sell the wheat of it, or burn the wheat of it,

according to my own good judgment! My Corn-Lawing friends, you

affright me.

To the 'Millo-cracy' so-called, to the Working Aristocracy,

steeped too deep in mere ignoble Mammonism, and as yet all

unconscious of its noble destinies, as yet but an irrational or

semirational giant, struggling to awake some soul in itself,--the

world will have much to say, reproachfully, reprovingly,

admonishingly. But to the Idle Aristocracy, what will the world

have to say? Things painful and not pleasant!